New Media Advocacy Training: Cameroon

Classes in Cameroon are progressing nicely, with students producing podcasts this week. The next challenge for our organization is placing our most talented youth with summer internships. Thus far, a number of organizations are interested in hosting student, but not all have the internal resources available to support a new media intern. As such, YAN is budgeting approximately 100 USD/student to pay for intern's transport, online access, and a small stipend for food. In the next couple months we will be identifying the students and their placements, and also looking for specific donors for each student. If that sounds like something you might be interested you'll hear more about it in our next report! Also, if you haven't yet liked us on Facebook or followed us on Twitter the links are below. Until then, I'd like to leave you with this post from the field about the kids' first podcasts:

First, to enlighten our readers who may not already know, let me present a definition: a podcast is an audio broadcast made available online for downloading onto a computer or an mp3 player, like an iPod. To tell the truth, I didn’t know very much about them either before this week, when it became my job to teach podcasting to my YAN students. Clara and I approached this unit with some trepidation: how, we wondered, were we going to be able to get all 90 of our YAN students to record their own discrete 3 or 4 minute audio presentation, all in one week, and all using one computer (since Audacity, our free audio recording software, only seems to want to work on my Mac). In spite of our unease, Clara and I created a template for students to use to script their podcast, and I prerecorded my own podcast, which I planned to play to students as an introduction to podcasting in general. And for the last two days, armed with printed copies of the script template, I’ve been in Limbe and Buea Town, trying out my podcast lesson with my first two batches of YAN students.

The experience at both schools was, I’m glad to report, a big success. Our students dove into script-writing with gusto, and had a great time practicing reading their scripts aloud and preparing to be recorded. When students came out to my computer to record their work, many brought with them a highly-polished and highly-creative presentation that they read flawlessly. Of course, there were occasional hiccups—mostly because Yakam in Limbe and Lucia in Buea Town managed to find ways of making everyone laugh and ruining several different groups’ podcasts. Luckily, Audacity makes it easy to cut out errors, and the end results have sounded awesome. Soon, once the podcasts have been loaded onto students’ websites, you’ll be able to check them out yourselves!

There is something about recording voices that brings out the silliness in kids (I suppose that’s a pretty obvious statement—indeed, there is something about recording anything and anyone that brings out the silliness in everyone). In Buea Town, once each group had managed to get through recording their podcasts without (too much) laughter, I came up with a game: I challenged our kids to see who could successfully record themselves reading a short text without laughing, while their peers stood in front of them and made silly faces. Only two kids—Ebanje and Sadis—managed to do it. Impressive. I don’t think I could have. Then, as I walked away from my computer to clean up the classroom, a few kids grouped around and started recording themselves singing. The results were pretty amazing--Noela, Wose, and Uche, it turns out, have the most beautiful voices.

All in all, podcasting has been going really well. It is so much fun to give kids an opportunity to brainstorm what they want to say, and then have a chance to play with this technology. And it’s also so nice to have a break from our Internet-heavy classes that are always disrupted by slow connections and power outages. Mostly, I’m just feeling a lot of love for the wonderful group of students we have this year in YAN. They are fun, creative, smart, sweet, and hilarious. I’ve invited a bunch of the Buea Town crowd over to my house on Thursday to eat some snacks and hang out and listen to music, and I can’t wait. I’m sure it will be a blast.

Happy holidays! Thanks to your September donations, 2012-2013 YAN Fellows Josh Nathan and Clara Rowe have been making great strides in Cameroon this year! They are working in three schools, reaching approximately 100 students. Students have already completed lessons in social justice, leadership, new media advocacy, and email basics. They are currenlty narrowing in on their group project topics, using the web to research:

"Our students are hard at work this week developing ideas for their social justice projects. During classes, we helped students separate into groups based upon topics of interest—government, environment, health, community, and education. Clara modeled a sample project based upon her own interest in the environment and local fisheries. We then challenged them to come up with a specific question they would like to research for the coming months. Their responses were amazing. Within minutes, our students were deep in conversations about why students fail their secondary school examinations and what the consequences are of polluted water sources in Cameroon. Diana was interested in learning more about whether Cameroon qualifies as a democracy; and Emmanuella and Delphine were wondering how the advent of modern movies, music, and ideas has affected traditional cultural practices in Cameroon." Josh Nathan, October 31st 2012

They will soon be putting their websites together and beginning thier multimedia projects!

In other news, YAN received a grant from the Pink House Foundation to begin an after school program in Washington, DC this coming spring semester. We are currently vetting potential partner schools in the area. This grant, in addition to the funds you all helped us raise in September, will keep YAN up and running through June. I am still, however, fundrasing to support the internship program over the summer. Each student-intern will cost approximately sixty dollars. This will pay for their transport as well as a small stipend. Without this stipend, many students would need to work over the summer to help support their families. If you have some spare change this Christmas season please consider sponsoring an intern! As a registered 501(c)3 charity, all YAN donations are tax deductable.

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